Following up on this post...
China is all the rage these days. Green, green, eco-friendly, graying, girl-poor, Communist China.
Wesley J. Smith alerts us to the latest installment.
A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate.
The treacly useful idiocy (after the iron-fist-in-the-glove rhetoric) only gets better. Sounds just like mid-20th-century commie sympathizers cooing over Mao and Castro:
China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.
Gosh, why doesn't she go live there?
Oh, and when I put up my last post, there were a few charitable readers (too charitable, in my opinion) who refused to believe that the article author was really promoting coercive population control. Well, don't tell me there's any ambiguity this time:
For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.
I wonder how old Diane Francis was when Paul Ehrlich predicted those same kinds of things...and they didn't happen. Oh, well, if at first you don't succeed [in using pseudo-science to institute world-wide totalitarianism], try, try again.
Comments (14)
As I posted on Dr. Smith's blog: shocking. And sad.
Posted by RobertK | December 10, 2009 10:33 PM
And what of the science czar--Holdren? President B.O. sure knows how to pick 'em!
Posted by TomH | December 11, 2009 12:03 AM
"girl-poor"
A shortage of girls is never a good thing. As Mother Teresa said of the poor, there can never be too many.
Posted by William Luse | December 11, 2009 2:52 AM
The weird thing is that demographic experts (and I don't mean specifically conservative ones) are finally beginning to catch on to the observation that the wealthiest countries generally have the lowest (non government-enforced) birth rates. You don't need to enforce low birth rates if you simply raise standards of living. Now, the _reasons_ for this observable fact are complex, and maybe they won't carry over to Muslim and African cultures. But then, the author doesn't really think the Muslims are going to accept a "planetary" one-child policy anyway, does she? Well, she probably imagines eradicating religion altogether since it is such a bogeyman on the fertility issue.
Posted by Tony | December 11, 2009 7:42 AM
Tony,
I don't know how much that understanding is really permeating, though you might be right. In his book, America Alone,Mark Steyn, does an excellent job of looking at the plummeting birth rates in westernized countries. (I believe it was Lydia that recommended the book to me, but not positive.)
I'm not sure if I'd grant that increased standards of living result in lower birth rates. While there may be a connection, I don't know if one is the cause of the other. What does seem clear is that in the wealthier countries, the value given to the family seems greatly diminished—even in the religious communities.
For example, I've heard just as degrading comments about Nadya Suleman (Octo-Mom) among members of the Christian community as from those outside that community. "She shouldn't be allowed to have that many children!," etc. A deacon at my own church actually dressed mockingly as Suleman for Halloween. (Not that there were no small number of ethical grievances to be had in the case, but it's sad to think that many people that want to consider themselves pro-life—and make comments like these—would have not known, or practically speaking even cared, had 7 of the children been aborted.)
What does seem obvious is that if we really want to reduce the population, we don't need laws, we only need to allow our grossly disturbed view of the value of human life to spread.
Posted by Robert_K | December 11, 2009 10:25 AM
What drives me completely batty is that many of the people who complain that I'm killing the environment with my 'huge' family are jetting off to the rainforest for vacations, eating organic beef from across the country instead of the local, non-organic stuff, and driving 70 miles each way to pick up their Amish 'raw milk.'
Meanwhile, we live in a house that is, if anything, on the small side, have one car, walk most places, and eat inexpensively.
So yeah, it's MY KIDS that are the problem, but your transportation-heavy lifestyle is great!!!! Because carbon only counts if the wrong kind of people are producing it-- you know, pro-life Catholics and whatnot. If you're producing it in the service of 'crunchy living,' the environment ignores it.......
Environmentalism is just a new iteration of the old-fashioned war on the lower classes. It's about being 'the right kind of person'-- which, coincidentally, seems to be 'the sort of person who spends money on what's currently fashionable' as opposed to 'the sort of person who lives frugally but has kids.'
Posted by deirdremundy | December 11, 2009 10:51 AM
Very well said.
Posted by Robert_K | December 11, 2009 2:11 PM
DeirdreMundy you hit the nail on the head
Posted by Jack | December 11, 2009 6:16 PM
What naivite Diane Francis has. Adopt a one-child policy and one has only one gene set per family. This greatly slows down the passing on of certain desirable traits. More than that, who, here, thinks the Bronze Age would have happened if the population of the world were somehow kept at a stable 23 people? Is 100 enough for the Bronze Age? Would the Industrial Revolution had occurred if the population had been at the level of the High Medieval Period? Think of how many people it takes to use and maintain the technology - steam engines must be made, boats must be built, railroads must be built, etc. Clearly, it takes a certain threshold for certain types of technological change to be assimilated within a culture. Perhaps we need 9 billion people because that is the threshold at which space travel becomes possible.
In any case, does she not realize that the worlds resources will run out, no matter how many people are on the planet? All she is doing is, possibly, slowing down the process, but she is creating other problems, in the meantime. A world of 3.3 billion people will be too spread-out to allow all of the continents to be maintained at any sort of technologically advanced level unless we cede more and more of our control to machines. Basically, she either wants menial labor or she wants inhuman labor to prevail. Either way, the result is to diminish the dignity of man.
Add to that the fact that a one child policy was only possible in China because they held to no religious beliefs, but treated people as, essentially, cattle. Any sort of belief that there is something greater than oneself will push one to have more than one child. All she wants is a higher standard of living at the expense of a higher standard of life.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | December 11, 2009 7:31 PM
Tony,
Is it really that simple? Much of the West's birth rate problem stems from a combination of factors (it's never clean in sociology, is it?)
-Liberal views about personal happiness that make large families burdensome.
-Birth control.
-The economic costs of having kids.
-Peer pressure based on classism and the assumption that mainly "poor trash" has more than 1-2 kids.
Probably more than that, but I think you get my point. There is hardly any proof that it is the wealth of these societies which is a factor. It's more likely memetic, since the West has more than enough wealth to actually have such an explosive population growth that we could, by all rights, be competing with China to export surplus population to Africa.
Posted by Mike T | December 14, 2009 3:20 PM
Speaking as a southerner, there is indeed a "wrong kind of person" when it comes to having kids. Anyone who has lived in the south knows them quite well, just as many people who've lived in any urban part of the US knows their minority counterparts.
My main beef with the environmentalists is that I tend to lump them in the same category, simply with more money.
Posted by Mike T | December 14, 2009 3:30 PM
Actually, there is an interesting point that got missed in the list. Those countries in the West who have pretty much abandoned a belief in God have the lowest birth rates (think England and Italy). In the United States, the birth rate never began to fall until the introduction of the pill and the erosion of religious beliefs in the 1960's. Prior to this, the U. S. was, at least after WWII, arguably, the richest country on Earth and still had a healthy birth rate. So, the correlation between a country having a lot of money and lower birth rate is false. It is the correlation between "richness" in a Biblical sense (including a lower regard for life as life is seen more and more as a commodity) and lower birth rate that exists.
In Africa, religion is booming and so is the birth rate. The same in India.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | December 14, 2009 4:25 PM
the correlation between a country having a lot of money and lower birth rate is false.
Really? Countries with more money have higher birth rates? Remember, we are talking correlation, not causation.
I suspect the cause is closer to materialism, which is the flip-side of abandoning theism. After all, man is made for worship, so he will worship someone or something.
Posted by c matt | December 14, 2009 5:11 PM
C Matt,
Too true.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | December 14, 2009 8:00 PM